Page 55 of The ARC Unit: Breach

Wolf did not look up. “Done?”

“Almost certainly not, but I’ll stop.”

I had been sitting beside Raven for almost an hour with Luca Bellandi’s file open in front of me, watching six people construct an increasingly sophisticated plan for learning everything about a party except what to do about anyone inside.

The weakness in the plan became obvious pretty quickly. We could watch people arrive and leave, track their cars and even keep eyes on most of the terrace. Hawk could identify faces from the ridge, while Raven could monitor phones and other signals around the property.

The problem was everything we couldn’t see.

The cabanas were mostly hidden, and parts of the house were completely out of view. If Bellandi or anyone else stepped away for a private conversation, we would know they had disappeared from sight but not what they were saying. It was a good surveillance plan as long as everyone stayed where we could watch them.

“What about inside?” I asked.

Wolf turned toward me. “What about it?”

“We’re building a complete picture of everyone arriving and leaving, but if Bellandi spends three hours talking to someone in a cabana, we get… a picture of him entering a cabana.”

Raven rotated one of the estate photographs. “If he keeps his phone on him, I may get device proximity.”

“Which tells us his phone stood near another phone.”

“Correct.”

“Useful,” I said. “Not exactly a transcript.”

Jackal leaned back in his chair. “We could bug the cabanas.”

Wolf answered before Raven could. “No.”

“I was joking.”

“You weren’t.”

Wolf’s attention returned to the map. “We don’t cross the perimeter before the event. Nobody gives their security team a reason to start checking for us.”

Annoyingly, he was right about the perimeter.

I looked at the photograph of the pool again, all white stone and blue water beneath cream umbrellas. A line of cabanas sat far enough from the house to make private conversations easy, with tall hedges behind them and enough landscaping to hide half the lower garden from the road.

“So we can see the outside,” I said.

Wolf made a small sound that meant he was already tired of the direction I was taking.

“We established that.”

“We can’t hear the inside.”

“Also established.”

I looked around the table.

Bear was studying the service entrance. Hawk had a terrain map open beside him. Viper was comparing two photographs of the valet area. Jackal had stolen one of Raven’s pens and was spinning it between his fingers until Raven noticed and took it back without interrupting whatever he was doing.

Six men who could breach a building, shoot across a valley, chase somebody through an alley or make a communications network regret existing. Not one of them could walk into a luxury pool party without looking as though the host had accidentally hired the world’s most aggressive bachelor party.

This was it.

“Send me.”